


A Soft, Kind Epilogue

by seductiveturnip



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Post 3x09, WES GIBBINS DESERVED BETTER
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-01 20:34:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8637181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seductiveturnip/pseuds/seductiveturnip
Summary: When she wakes up, she can’t speak. Something about all the smoke she’d inhaled and damage to her vocal chords, but that’s okay. Laurel doesn’t want to speak. She wants to die.





	

When she wakes up, she can’t speak. Something about all the smoke she’d inhaled and damage to her vocal chords, but that’s okay. Laurel doesn’t want to speak. She wants to die.

 

***

 

When she’s discharged, they _make_ her speak. Her voice feels raw and tremulous with lack of use and she can barely get it above a whisper, and they’re impatient with her, keep asking her what she knows even though she knows nothing but they keep asking, keep asking her what she knows and she wishes she knew everything and she wishes she knew everything and she wishes she knew everything so the future could be quiet or they could at least talk about something else.

 

***

 

One of the cartoon networks on her TV plays an old school Disney marathon all weekend.

Wes used to do a great Donald Duck impression, murmuring, “ _What’s the big idea?_ ” against her ear when they were in class or working, and when Laurel would giggle he’d act all offended, indignant, demanding, “ _Oh, a wise guy, huh?_ ” Sometimes, later on, he’d step into her space and lean over her, breathing “ _Hiya, toots,_ ” against her neck in that dead-on voice and he’d crack a smile and he was so full of light it hurt her just to look at him.

Laurel ends up dragging herself to the minimart to buy a bottle of tequila so she can get drunk enough to watch all the Donald Duck shows and cry herself to sleep

 

***

 

“Who is he?” asks the boy in the bar, ceasing the wandering of his hands. She doesn’t blame him. She has nothing whole to give him, no way to fill him up - she stares down her reflection at the bottom of her glass and sees only ash, a cremation. His hands reached for her and found only dust. “Who is he?”

She curls into herself instinctively, his name too heavy in her mouth. 

In truth, there had been a lot of ‘he’s.’ Fathers. Brothers. Men who got her number without her giving it to them. Men who sent her dickpics when she said she hoped they were well. Men licking at her ears when she was throwing up at a party. Men who drooled on her because she was young, then laughed at her for being naive. He’s who had hurt her. He’s who she’d hated. He’s who she’d loved. 

“He’s dead.”

 

***

 

For Laurel and Wes, tragedy was never more than two weeks away from itself, which is why Laurel would lie awake in the night, curled against his side and trying to commit him to memory lest he disappear before her eyes.

He always knew, though. As if her dread had pierced his sleep, his eyes would flutter open, refocusing, and her heart would leap desperately in her chest as a tiny, content smile stretched across his lips. “What are you worrying about?”

She’d press her finger into one of his dimples. “I don’t know,” she mumbled softly. “You. Me. Everything. I just feel like…” she sucked in a breath. “I’ve just never been this happy before and had it all be okay.” 

And he’d look at her so sweetly like she was something incredibly precious and whisper, “I know,” and he’d stroke her hair and mumble to her nonsensically until she’d feel her eyelids grow heavy, drifting off to the steady beat of his heart, giggling every time he said something particularly silly and at one point he was silent a few moments and she glanced up at him and he just looked at her and said, “You’re my favourite person in the world,” and in those moments, she’d wanted him for the rest of her life. 

 

***

 

Wes is never going to go to Europe. He’s never going to adopt that one-eyed dog from the pound he’d fallen in love with when they went together. He’s never going to eat obscene amounts of mint choc-chip ice cream again or actually become a lawyer and nobody’s going to ride his bike now that he’s gone.

Wes died alone.

 

***

 

 

She still longs for him. She can’t really remember a time she didn’t long for him. Wes, with his warmth and his quiet intensity and hands that somehow always managed to end up tangled in hers, even from the start. It hadn’t really been a big deal - Laurel was harbouring a little crush on Wes. So what. Everyone had a crush on Wes - _Annalise_ probably had a crush on Wes. And besides, he’d been Rebecca, and she’d been with Frank (sort of), and then he hadn’t been with Rebecca but she’d still been with Frank (sort of), and he’d been with Meggy and Laurel had managed to extract Frank from her life long enough to realize maybe the ache in her chest she felt whenever he looked at her wasn’t so easy to ignore anymore. 

“Are you okay?” he’d whispered, taking her arm so they’d fall in step behind the others. “You look exhausted.”

“Wow, thanks.”

His eyes had crinkled, his stupid, ridiculous puppy dog eyes, warm and chocolate and tinged with concern, always so concerned, always so worried, and she remembered how much she’d wanted to reach out and smooth out the furrow between his brow. “Come on.”

“It’s nothing, it’s fine, I just…”

He tilted his head. He always knew when she was lying.

(Frank never did). 

“Do you want to come over later?” he mumbled, reaching for her hand and then thinking better of it. “I’ve actually decided I don’t want to fail law school, so I’ve got some great notes handy.”

And she’d smiled, and she’d nodded, and she’d poked his side and teased, “Don’t get cocky now, waitlist,” and they’d giggled all the way to where Annalise was waiting for them in the living room and she’d told them to stop laughing and get to work. 

That night, Laurel wakes up from dreaming of his perfect face, kicking and thrashing, screaming, terrified, though not entirely sure of what. 

 

***

 

“Let’s take a trip next week,” he’d said in her ear, trying to keep his voice low or Annalise would bite them. “Just you and me.”

(Now, she only thinks of every next week that will never happen).

 

***

 

He was always so private. For so long, he’d never told any of them anything, but it was Laurel who always knew the most. Every time he shared something with her - his past, his mother, Rebecca, Haiti - she’d always feel inexplicably touched, like he’d handed her another fragile, delicate piece ofhimself so that she could see him better. Wes didn’t trust anybody - but he trusted her. She couldn’t think of the last thing that had made her both effervescently happy and achingly, desperately sad. 

Sometimes, when he thought she wasn’t looking, he’d stare off quietly into space, eyes glazed over with pain and a frown pulling at the corners of his mouth, and she’d watch him as the tears threatened to spill down his cheeks and feel like she too was about to cry, because she could try and save Wes from the law and the world and the people in it, but she couldn’t save Wes from himself. 

And then she couldn’t save Wes at all.

 

***

 

Frank comes by one day, picks the lock when she doesn’t answer the door.

“I was gonna bring something,” he tries, but his hands are empty. His hands were always empty. 

Later, when they’ve been watching Donald Duck shorts for twenty minutes, Frank turns to her, searching for the right words. His eyes are resting on a photo of her and Wes on the mantelpiece, taken before the summer. “Laurel.”

She looks at the photo. Wes has his arm slung around her shoulders and he’s pressing a kiss to the top of her head. 

“Did you love him?”

Did she love him? Did she love him? Oh, she loved him with a love that burned soft, like a candlelight, with a gentleness she didn’t know she’d ever be capable of. A love that felt so full and hopeful she sometimes felt she could burst with it. 

A love that wasn’t enough. 

“No,” she says, and she feels herself choke on the lie. 

 

***

 

The baby died, and Laurel hadn’t really cared. She had too much grief but none to spare for the life that had been growing inside her quietly, unbeknownst to her. Honestly, she probably would have gotten rid of it, had things been different. She and Wes would have held hands in the clinic and he would have kissed her knuckles before they took her in and they would have had an early night, swaddled in blankets and pillows and in the morning, he would have made her terrible, burned pancakes in bed. Then, maybe, a few years later, when they had both graduated and they were both lawyers and they had a place, maybe they’d try again. Have a life that Laurel never knew she’d wanted for herself. 

But things aren’t different, and she and Wes will never get that life, and the baby died all the same, and it wasn’t until a few days after she was released from hospital that she’d realized that child was all she had left of him, and she had screamed and screamed and clawed at her empty stomach and fell asleep on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor to the sound of a soft, kind epilogue that neither of them were going to get. 

 

***

 

Wes died criminally young, a few months after his twenty-third birthday. He was the gentlest thing, and so beautiful that she could cry, and she does. All the time. 

Here is the truth: his left dimple is two inches higher than the other and it is her favourite thing about him. 

Was. 

_Was_ her favourite thing about him. 

She sleeps okay these days. She doesn’t see him in her dreams anymore (mostly). Some nights, she wakes up, crawls to the bottom drawer of her closet that she refuses to empty out and tries to go back to sleep wrapped in his old flannel even though it doesn’t even smell like him anymore. 

She never told him she loved him. Not really. And this is perhaps the worst thing, between the longing and the fear and the regret, that ashes are ashes and dirt is dirt and she is cold and lonely without him and he never even knew that to her, he was everything. He was all there was. 

If Laurel could see him, she would ask him what it’s like to be warm. 

If Laurel could see him, she would ask him to kiss her one last time.

**Author's Note:**

> COMMENTS ARE ALWAYS SOSOSOSOSOSO LOVELY <33
> 
> im angry and bitter about everything  
> come cry with me on tumblr seductiveturnip.tumblr.com


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